They say a picture is worth a thousand words. (They also say to avoid cliches like the plague, but sometimes a saying is just too good to not use.) That’s the first thing that came to mind once I started playing Umurangi Generation, a game that’s ostensibly about photography but is also a lot like an iceberg. You definitely get what you see at first glance, but there’s also so very much hidden below the surface.
Developed by Origame Digital and published by Playism, Umurangi Generation takes place in the near future, in the city of Tauranga, Aotearoa (also called New Zealand). The game’s imagery is clearly and heavily inspired by Maori culture, which I am absolutely not qualified to comment on the accuracy of, given that I’m a white Britnadian with no connection to that part of the world, let alone that culture. But I will say that for what it’s worth, it’s fantastic to see representation from people and places that aren’t often seen in Western media.
Especially when it comes to dystopian futures. “The end of the world as we know it” is most often set in the US or the UK, and by looking in the mirror or media, you might be forgiven for assuming the rest of the world is so unimportant that no stories of value could be set there. But the world is a big place, filled with people, all with their unique cultures and expressions and value, and Umurangi Generation has you pointing your camera right at that world as it dies, as part of the Red Sky Generation, a silent witness to something honestly incredible.
PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY
In Umurangi Generation, you play as a package courier and photographer, and your goal is pretty simple: take pictures, and deliver packages. With each level you’re given a number of bounties to photograph (5 seagulls, for instance, or a picture of a certain word), and once you’ve collected all the bounties, the package delivery site will appear. Simple enough! The controls are very similar to a typical first-person shooter game, so if you’ve played any of them, you should get the control scheme down pretty quickly.
You also get bonuses for additional optional tasks, like collecting rolls of camera film, or recreating postcard shots. Collect the mandatory bounties and deliver the package in under 10 minutes for yet more bonuses… though to be completely honest, I am absolutely crap at doing so within that time limit. At least on my first play of the game. I was too intent on exploring and figuring out what cool pictures I could take of just… anything and everything, and I wasn’t looking to speedrun things on my first go. I was happy to just wander around and take photos of the graffiti art and cool landscape shots.
…I never claimed I was any kind of exciting photographer…
With each progressive level, you gain new lenses for your camera. Wide angle, telephoto, etc. Either that or you gain the ability to shift something in the final processing of your photo, like adjusting the colour contrast. Little touches like this not only open up different photo bounties that you need to take with specific lenses, but also allow the player to put personal touches on their photos, in accordance with their own artistic style. Really like desaturated greyscale photos? That’s cool, you can have those. Do you enjoy how things look with a fish-eye lens? Also an option for you! Honestly, Umurangi Generation gives players a basic grounding in real-world photography and image editing, giving them the chance to play around with things before investing hundreds of dollars on a passion project. There are photography games out there that don’t do this, so I really have to give credit where it’s due here.
I will say, though, that the photo bounties are sometimes frustrating to get, requiring some truly ridiculous setups in order to capture properly. One, I recall, had me jumping behind a chain-link fence in order to get a photo of two cats, one of which was across the street and almost completely obscured by a plank of wood, but hey, it counted!
LOOK BELOW THE SURFACE
Umurangi Generation is a game you can’t simply call a photography game. Not once you get past, oh, the second level. It starts off innocently enough, with the weirdest thing being the tutorial’s note to not take pictures of the weird blue jellyfish that you might see, and that you’ll learn why later.
Then you start seeing the military presence.
Then come the warnings and graffiti and newspaper clippings about the interplanetary menace that has invaded the world, the talk of kaiju (giant monsters, the sort you’d see in Godzilla movies). You take photos and deliver packages in walled-off cities, in military bases, in an active warzone…
And then you remember seeing those little blue jellyfish in the game’s first level, and it all takes on such a sinister light.
What started as a fun game about taking cool photos turns into a game about you documenting humanity’s fight against a destructive menace that can’t be reasoned with, and a government response that was hopelessly inadequate, and outsiders stepping in where many people didn’t want them.
And there you are, in the thick of it, alongside the soldiers and the citizens, taking pictures and trying to not get overwhelmed by the enormity of what you’re documenting.
POWERFUL ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING
The only words you’ll really see in Umurangi Generation are in signs, posters, graffiti spray-painted on walls in glowing neon. There’s no dialogue. There doesn’t need to be. You pick up the story from the world around you, putting the pieces together from environmental clues that are everywhere you look. The future you walk through in this game gives up its secrets in movie posters, in ads for stores and services, in propaganda, in streets blocked off with debris. Photography was an excellent way to get players to deliberately stop and look, to really consider what they were seeing, and thus to come face-to-face with the all the implications of those sights. The subtlety of it all means greater impact, since everything has a greater chance to seep slowly and quietly into the player’s mind, rather than a character going off on some long exposition about the day the evil jellyfish monsters came to town.
The game has a lot to say, and it’s going to make sure you hear it. Artistic expression is all over, the graffiti on the walls is telling you what the people are saying, what’s important to them, what mark they want to make. Political satire, cultural icons, or just something the artist thought looked cool, something they wanted to make. The graffiti in the game is really captivating, varied and expressive, and it’s extremely difficult to let it go unnoticed as you play. A person could get lost in seeing what others have scrawled on walls, and indeed I did get distracted by it a lot, searching for new and interesting pieces of public art to capture with my camera.
There’s a power to letting someone come to their own conclusions by convincing them to open their eyes and really see. And I think that’s Umurangi Generation‘s greatest strength. I would have played and enjoyed this game if it were just a simple photography game, something where I go around and take pictures and get points or fulfill objectives and then move on to a new location. But the fact that it gives me so much more, gives me a powerful and emotional narrative that can really only be appreciated by looking around and paying attention, elevated this game from “fun” to “phenomenal.” As I said at the beginning of my review, it’s a lot like an iceberg: there’s the simplicity of the game on the top, but below the surface it’s massive and complex and so much bigger than you thought it could be.
I don’t want to spoil too much about the game, because frankly, it’s a hidden gem and I want more people to play it and experience it for themselves. I want them to ponder what the game is saying about propaganda, about control, about the strength and weakness of humanity. I want their jaws to drop when they hit that moment when the game turns serious. It’s the sort of game that hits hard when you don’t expect it, and leaves an incredible and haunting impact.
Umurangi Generation is currently available on Steam and Nintendo Switch, and also has DLC which adds some interesting new features and a new aspect to the narrative. I highly recommend it for fans of environmental storytelling, and also for those who want to learn a little more about photography while they explore a cyberpunk-neon world.
(Game provided by the developer in exchange for an honest review.)
Quadnines 
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